Sunday, November 26, 2006

Gore Vidal: I’m now a creationist.

"Rep. Henry Waxman has spent the last six years waging a guerrilla campaign against the White House and its corporate allies, launching searing investigations into everything from military contracts to Medicare prices from his perch on the Government Reform Committee.

In January, Waxman becomes committee chairman - and thus the lead congressional hound of an administration many Democrats feel has blundered badly as it expanded the power of the executive branch.

"Just like O.J. Simpson, President Bush should "hypothetically confess" what "blunders" let to "civil war" in Iraq, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd argues.

"After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and give an interview headlined: 'If I did it, here's how the civil war in Iraq happened,'" Dowd writes."

"Chickenhawks rarely if ever try to make the case that as awful as the sufferings of war are for everyone involved, reluctantly, this war is necessary. That is because there simply is no case to be made, never has been. Instead the chickenhawks are happy to go to war; rather than acknowledge that sometimes war is a solemn, unavoidable obligation, we hear about Grand Global Strategies or that Saddam was working with al Qaeda, or war is some kind of of post 9/11 therapy. And the chickenhawk discourse descends rapidly to the moral sewer, where a demented John Podhoretz will blithely talk about how the biggest mistake at the beginning of Bush/Iraq was that "we" didn't kill enough young Iraqis. (The biggest mistake at the beginning of the war was starting it.)

But the chickenhawks go even further than just excitedly embracing the prospect of waging war against Iraq for no reason. They have the unmitigated gall to denounce everyone who opposed Bush/Iraq as naive, as traitorous, as third-rate minds, as not really comprehending the nature of the threat, and so on. They are perfectly willing to describe the tens of millions of people who marched in February '03 in opposition to the war as "objectively pro-Saddam," a remark as utterly ignorant as high-five enthusiasm to fight a war is.

In short, it is the lack of even the slightest comprehension of what war really is, combined with their belligerent, dismissive arrogance that makes the question of the chickenhawks' own willingness to serve in the Bush/Iraq war a more than fair question."